New YouTube channel from the Ship of the Fens

[Quilisma]

Regulars on this board may (or, alternatively, may not) be interested to know that Ely Cathedral has launched its own YouTube channel, to which a number of videos are due to be uploaded in the fullness of time. As a taster, one of eight short films made about ten years ago (with soundtrack from a CD recorded in 2004) was posted a couple of months ago, and presumably the other seven will appear shortly. However, today the first three videos have been released from our Candlemas Meditation on Tuesday 2nd February 2016, at which a professional camera crew were present. There was an address by Rowan Williams, two organ pieces and twelve choral items, so several more videos are due to follow.

https://www.youtube.com/c/ElyCathedralCambridge

Just for transparency, this was a ticketed "event" rather than a liturgy as such, but at least that meant there could be special publicity. (Candlemas had of course been observed liturgically in proper fashion, but two days early, on Sunday 31st January.) All the singing was in the Choir because of the film crew, but there was seating throughout the Presbystery and (albeit unsighted) in the Octagon. Hundreds of people attended. There were thousands of candles all around the place, particularly in the Nave (which was free of chairs), so the Cathedral did look very pretty indeed.

The coughing is a reminder that these videos, and all the videos yet to come, were filmed 100% live as the occasion proceeded, with absolutely no patching or retakes after the event. We think that's a good thing; several other choirs I could care to mention (but won't) are very much more geared towards the packaged perfect product for posterity and publicity, even in their unedited webcasts of regular services. For us it's just a bonus if there's a "legacy" like this and if it sounds pretty much OK! The Opus Dei comes first.

Along with our Twitter presence and our revamped website, we're certainly taking notice of the need to be visible but in a good way. Perhaps this will mean that people on here will be marginally less inclined to raise eyebrows at our annual round-the-inside-of-the-Cathedral chorister pancake race photo shoots: we do other things as well, like singing!

[light_calibre_baritone]

Great stuff. Caught the Dupre organ piece video... Why does Mr Aldhouse have cans on?!

[Quilisma]

Great stuff. Caught the Dupre organ piece video... Why does Mr Aldhouse have cans on?!

Good question! But having page-turned up in the loft on a few occasions I found that the sound from up there is, from my non-organist perspective at least, alarmingly bizarre: the bits of the organ that are basically right next to you sound VERY loud and speak VERY immediately, while some of the rest is either almost completely inaudible or appears to be significantly delayed, because much of the organ is round the corner in the north transept so comes back in the echo. Of course, being entirely used to this by now he would have been able to ignore what it sounded like from up there, but at least with the cans you can hear what it sounds like from a better vantage point! Most of the music that evening was with the choir, so the cans would have been essential for those items: you really can hear virtually nothing useful of the choir over the organ if you're sitting there without cans on. I presume the film crew though this was an interesting feature: after all, he might secretly have been listening to thrash metal or something!

[ardcarp]

I think 'cans' are pretty much essential at Liverpool (Anglican) Cathedral too.

[Miles Coverdale]

Why is the channel called Ely Cathedral Cambridge? Wasn't Ely Cathedral availlable?

[Quilisma]

Why is the channel called Ely Cathedral Cambridge? Wasn't Ely Cathedral availlable?

No idea. Presumably because "ElyCathedral" was rejected as a channel name. Of course, there are plenty of people who think of us as a further-flung and quainter outpost of Cambridge, and at the other extreme people who think we're in a different universe here. Perhaps it will annoy some people that the name "Cambridge" appears here. But arguably there wouldn't even have been a university there if our forebears in the Benedictine Cathedral Priory here hadn't decided it would be a good plan!

[Quilisma]

Don't forget that YouTube is operated by Google, and Google always likes to ask whether "Ely" means the one in Glamorgan or the one in New South Wales... And "Ely, Cambridgeshire" would have been too long to put in the channel name. Presumably neither of the other places called Ely have a cathedral, though! (Arguably we ARE in some sense "Cambridge Cathedral" because Cambridge is in our diocese and doesn't have a cathedral or a see of its own.)

Incidentally, from the choir's perspective it wasn't ideal to launch this channel on Wednesday, because it deflected attention from the big event of the day, the Friends of Cathedral Music Diamond Fund Gala Concert at St Paul's Cathedral, to which we duly sent as our singing ambassador our current holder of the Friends of Cathedral Music Choristership. (Apparently it was an amazing experience.) Meanwhile, apparently the Candlemas videos will be uploaded gradually over the next eleven weeks. We'll all have to be patient...

[Magnificat]

Meanwhile, apparently the Candlemas videos will be uploaded gradually over the next eleven weeks. We'll all have to be patient...

Q

I suppose the videos invite the question as to whether you feature in close up? It would be nice to put a face to the pseudonym!

VCC

[Quilisma]

Q

I suppose the videos invite the question as to whether you feature in close up? It would be nice to put a face to the pseudonym!

VCC

Oh would it now? I daresay the feeling might be mutual...

Well, the cameras roam round everybody, and there are only two choral items up so far, with (at a guess) eight or nine more to be added over the next few weeks. Behold a quantity of Quilismata. Quite which might be Ur-Quilisma is immaterial.

I'm somewhat relieved to see that nobody has (yet?) done a critique!

[Quilisma]

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I would be interested to hear what people think about a particular point. A good friend of mine (who definitely DOES know what he is talking about) recently confessed that he had found our YouTube channel disappointing, and that he felt that it was not good publicity, on the grounds that, with the exception of the organ playing, the standard of performance is simply inadequate: just not good enough. Of course, when compared with the studio recordings and extremely carefully selected live clips that most choirs use in their publicity, entirely unedited warts-and-all fly-on-the-wall documentary footage of all fourteen musical items on one particular exhausting occasion, a Tuesday evening at the beginning of February at the end of a normal full school/working day, with extremely limited rehearsal time on the day and very limited visibility owing to candle-lit conditions, and with microphones in positions not optimally suited for the sort of singing which has to project through the whole building, is likely to have many more imperfections, and these will doubtless offend some people. But arguably it's more honest, even brave, not to pick and choose what gets to be heard. The Jonathan Dove piece, Vast Ocean of Light, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q536sL8Z808, was in fact the final of twelve sung items on the night (there are several more pieces to be uploaded, but they have not been put up in sequence), and by that point many of us (in both rows) had been on the go for maybe thirteen hours or more without much of a break. Unsurprisingly, we were every bit as tired as it sounds. I merely venture humbly to suggest that the conditions of the occasion were never likely to engender fresh-as-a-daisy ultra-polished singing such as one might wish to present in the event of any sort of X-versus-Y adjudication. That is emphatically not what we were aiming to do with these videos. So I'm sorry if they are to be deemed musically mediocre, but it is what it is.

[Roger Judd]

Well, Quilisma, I have just watched/listened to Jonathan Dove's Vast Ocean of Light. I don't know the piece at all, but what came across to me was an ensemble fully committed to the work in hand, and delivering it with 100% concentration and attention. How your friend can describe that performance as 'simply inadequate' I'm hard-pressed to understand. OK, maybe, once in awhile a note wasn't sung in the middle - so what. This is live music-making, not some sterile studio job, and for me that is infinitely more engaging. Musically mediocre - I think not.

Should I declare an interest? OK, for four years I worked at Ely Cathedral as assistant organist (1968-72). We weren't polished in those days, but my goodness, we performed - it could be very exciting!
RJ

[ardcarp]

Dear Quilisma,

I think your friend played you false! Watching the Dove piece (which I do know) in live performance was brilliant...especially so as the mikes were in a very 'immediate' position. It is indeed a brave thing to have a Youtube channel where stuff goes out en-edited.

If I have any reservation at all, it is not about the choir, its brio, its excellent direction and accompaniment. It is rather that I am not of the Facebook generation that wants to share everything online from eating an ice-lolly in Lyme Regis to crossing the Grand Canyon on a high wire.

But that's just me. If the work of the choir and cathedral music (and the religious would say 'the Word of God') is reaching a wide audience, this must be a Good Thing.

Congrats to the choir....and ignore your friend!

[decantor]

Quilisma, your friend no doubt advises you with your choir’s best interests at heart, but I beg you to pay no heed – Ely is not in competition with The Sixteen. As one who has been in thrall to cathedral music for 60 years or more, I have always made a point of attending any pre-service rehearsal in the quire: the very sound of a liturgical choir is thrilling and uplifting, even in stop-start mode. What the Ely videos achieve – as Roger Judd tellingly implies above – is not perfection but performance. True enough, but the remarkable thing is how often cathedral choirs can make the two qualities converge, and Ely shares in that tendency. I count myself fortunate to be able to share your choral offerings online.

You tell us, semi-apologetically, of the conditions under which the Dove piece (I adore his contribution to the repertoire) was recorded – at bedtime after a hard day. It shows just occasionally in the breath support of the trebles, but it is refuted by the commitment of all voices to MAKE THE MUSIC WORK. I subscribe to your channel because that’s what you do – AMDG – and I thank you for it. Please give us more.

[Quilisma]

Thank you very much, everyone! To be honest I think I slightly exaggerated the reported comments. I'm sure he understood the context of the filming and therefore appreciated that it would perhaps be unreasonably churlish to expect performances of a quality such that everything could be released commercially without further ado; he merely felt that it was unwise to put up videos of performances with technical flaws and less-than-perfect singing, on the grounds that other (more famous) choirs invariably post recordings of only the very highest quality (whether recorded live or under studio conditions), and that our videos would inevitably be compared (unfavourably) with such output. Fair comment, I suppose. I'm afraid there are some rather unreasonable people out there, including, shock horror, among choral aficionados! A little knowledge goes a long way...

I share people's reservations about the culture of publicity, marketing and PR. But the sad reality is that these days you more or less HAVE to join the club. A handful of choirs have an extremely visible "presence" and are very widely recognised as being world-class (usually with good reason), and unfortunately there can be an assumption that choirs which are less visible must be inferior or simply aren't in the game at all. It's not that we have been hiding, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that there are several very well known (and very well exposed) choirs here in our diocese which are acknowledged to be among the very best of their type in the whole world. Four Cambridge college choirs webcast very regularly (one of them webcasts every service), and of course on those webcasts you will hear nothing but perfection. (I wonder whether this will indirectly lead to certain choirs shying away from singing excitingly in case it doesn't quite come off but ends up being posted online...) And there is something of an arms race there when it comes to commercial recordings. Clearly we have never been part of this, and cathedral choirs are a different sort of thing anyway: for better or worse, project-oriented music lists and very generous rehearsal allocations would be unthinkable and unworkable in the super-high-turnover daily round of the Opus Dei. We do make CDs here, but not particularly often these days, and to the best of my knowledge they are not stocked in any shops except in the Cathedral itself. (They are certainly nowhere to be seen in Cambridge, for obvious reasons.) In this context it's important to do what one can not to be overlooked completely: to be noticed, and preferably for the right reasons! It's no secret or surprise that recruitment has never been easy here, especially in the shadow of Cambridge, and one thing that will help prevent prospective applicants (and parents of applicants) from overlooking us completely or discounting us out of hand is if they can readily see and hear what we do. They could of course come and visit, but some people still seem to think Ely is impossibly remote, although in fact our transport links here are excellent (by train, at least): if anything, even better than Cambridge's... (Someone recently posited to me that some people who live further away may not have the same blind spot as some people in our own locality do. There may be something in that!)

The idea of filming this particular event (the Candlemas Meditation, on the evening of Tuesday 2nd February) and putting the videos on a new Ely Cathedral YouTube channel came from the Development officers rather than the music department, but we all felt it wasn't a bad idea. Arguably the live and unedited nature of the videos is distinctive in itself; it certainly shows we're not claiming to be something we're not, and whether that's a good thing is up to others to decide! Of course, I'm sure we had the right of veto.

Those who have enjoyed these videos so far will be glad to know that there are approximately eight more to come over the next few weeks. And yes, they WERE all filmed in one go without a break; but then again, you need an awful lot of stamina in this job, especially in the run-up to Christmas and in Holy Week and Easter... I suspect there may be other occasions filmed in the future, depending on what we are asked to do, but there are a number of logistical complications surrounding that. It would be great to do something with the Girls' Choir too, but there are a different set of complications there, as they come under the jurisdiction of the school rather than the Cathedral. Still, from the other prospective, it would be nice if the men could be involved in one of their CDs at some point, considering that we sing services with them on a very regular basis and that they are an absolutely integral part of the Cathedral Choir.

Anyway, happy listening and watching, and St Etheldreda says hello. Oh, and by the way, Roger, I understand you are one of the former Assistant Organists who is coming back to play in the gala recital for Arthur's ninetieth birthday soon. I really hope I can get to that!

[Roger Judd]

Yes indeed - Tuesday, June 14th at 7.30pm - should be a great celebration. Arthur was on fine form when I visited earlier this year. It was great to hear Carleton Etherington play his Tongues of Fire after evensong from Tewkesbury Abbey this week - an absolutely splendid performance.
RJ